O'Reilly is a strange thing to review next to course platforms, because it is not really competing with them. Nobody signs up here to be walked through a curriculum. You subscribe because you want the animal books, all of them, all the time, and once you understand that framing the value question becomes much easier to answer. The library is the product and it is excellent.
Roughly sixty thousand titles, including basically everything O'Reilly has published and a large amount from other technical publishers, searchable in one place. For anyone whose work involves regularly needing to properly understand something new, this changes how you research. Instead of buying a $55 book, waiting for it, discovering chapter four is what you needed and the rest is not relevant, you search across the whole catalogue, read the three relevant chapters from four different books, and move on. Several of the books we recommend elsewhere in this catalogue, including Aurélien Géron's and Chip Huyen's, are included in the subscription, which is worth doing the arithmetic on if you were planning to buy them anyway.
Early release is the underrated feature. Getting chapters of a serious technical book while it is still being written, months ahead of publication, matters a lot in fields that move quickly, and it is the closest thing to staying current through books rather than blog posts. The live online training is also genuinely included rather than being an upsell, and the sessions I have seen have been run by people who know the material properly, though you do need to be organised about signing up because they are scheduled events and not recordings you can drift into. The sandboxes and interactive environments are fine and clearly the least loved part of the platform.
If hands-on labs are what you want, the cloud providers do this better. Where I would push back on the marketing is the suggestion that this is a place to learn from zero. It is not, and trying to use it that way will waste your money. There is no path, no sequencing, no assessment and nothing telling you what to read next.
It assumes you are a working technical professional who already knows how to identify a gap, find the right material and hold yourself accountable for reading it. A beginner dropped into sixty thousand books will drown, and would be far better served by a structured free course. There are also no credentials that carry weight, so if part of your goal is something to put on a CV, this contributes nothing directly. Then there is the price, which is the real decision.
At around $499 a year it is one of the more expensive individual subscriptions in this space, and the honest test is frequency of use rather than breadth of catalogue. If you open it most weeks, it pays for itself several times over against buying books individually. If you open it twice a quarter when something specific comes up, you are subsidising other people's reading habits and should just buy the two books. A lot of subscribers, I suspect, fall into the second group while telling themselves they are in the first.
My advice is to take the trial seriously as an experiment. Do not use it to binge, use it exactly as you would use it normally, and count how many times you actually reach for it in ten days. Also check whether your employer already has a team licence, because a surprising number of engineering organisations do and a surprising number of their engineers have no idea.